Musical Chairs: 2010 Preseason

In politics, pretty much every open-seat race, primary challenge, and retirement has a sort of trickle-down effect – when someone moves up (or tries to), others see opportunities to move into vacancies created by those seeking higher office. You could liken it to a whole lot of people trying to climb the same ladder, or maybe a game of musical chairs (in some cases, full-contact musical chairs!). When you’re talking about Democratic politics in NY, where most seats are categorized as “safe”, “safer”, or “safest”…the pressure surrounding a seat opening up can get intense.

As about eleventy million people consider running for Attorney General in 2010 – assuming, for the moment, that sitting AG Andrew Cuomo does run for governor like pretty much everyone and their mother thinks he will – about twice that many people are thinking of moving into the new vacancies the AG hopefuls would create. And two times eleventy million people squared are looking at the vacancies that could be created in turn by those seeking to fill the AG hopefuls’ offices. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

And so the potential race for AG, with six potential candidates on the Democratic side ID’ed by the NYT, trickles down to Senate District 31, a strip of Manhattan and the Bronx running from the UWS up through Riverdale. Via Manhattan Times, here’s a YouTube of Councilman Robert Jackson endorsing Mark Levine, founder of the Barack Obama Democratic Club, for (a) a seat that has not yet been vacated by (b) a senator who hasn’t even announced an intention to run for a higher office that (c) he pretty much definitely wouldn’t run for unless its current occupant runs for an even higher office.

Is your head spinning yet?

(Assemblyman Adriano Espaillat is also said to be interested in the SD-31 seat.)